What About Thad?

There was a lot of talk about Milt Gross press not too long ago with the release of Craig Yoe’s The Complete[sic] Milt Gross. I didn’t pay much attention because I’m not the biggest fan of Gross. His writing is leagues ahead of his comic contemporaries, but the art makes me feel claustrophobic if I look at it too long.

All the talk though reminded me that Gross designed the titles for Roxie Hart, Fox’s tacky 1942 remake of Chicago with Ginger Rogers, and that I actually had a copy of the movie. So here are those titles for your enjoyment. Gross was an inspired choice to do them because he sums up the tone of the film nicely.

Someone posted the complete version of Professor Small and Mr. Tall on YouTube (the version for the syndicated Totally Tooned In! package removed the foreboding scene of the gay ghost as Hitler shooting himself).

The short has a lot going for it as far as laughs (more than what Leonard Maltin says anyway, whose panning of it has been burnt into everyone’s memory for thirty years), but at the same time, when you look at it from a technical standpoint, the short is sort of a mess. For starters, the animation is pretty bad. Obviously, John Hubley and his crew were excited over the stylized animation that Jones was establishing in his 1942 shorts at Schlesinger’s, but it looks like they either didn’t have the time or money to perfect doing it themselves. The animation tries to pop/settle from pose to pose, but it just ends up looking stiff. It also looks as though the characters were designed without much thought of how they’d play out in animation.

That’s par for the course with the 1940s Columbia cartoon output though. Some of the animation can be on the level of the average Warner short (when Emery Hawkins, Don Williams, Ray Patterson, Grant Simmons, or NY import Morey Reden are behind it); a lot of it is as bad as the average Terrytoon or worse. A very schizophrenic studio for sure.

You can see a much funnier and better animated UPA cartoon that tries this style, The Miner’s Daughter at Kevin’s site.

Mike Sporn posted scans of the obscenely rare Piccoli children’s book by Paul Julian, a must-see for anyone interested in the phenomenally talented artist.

As somewhat of a companion piece, here’s the Friz Freleng directed sequence from the 1948 Dennis Morgan/Jack Carson feature, Two Guys from Texas. No question that the gorgeous Julian backgrounds are the highlight of it. Julian remarked to Shamus Culhane once that he never did anything at Warners that was in his own “vision,” only Freleng’s. A surprisingly dismissive statement, given that Julian’s are regularly the best of the Warner background paintings of the 1940s. (I guess it was no good because it was all for smartass animals and stupid humor.) Also on display here are some great caricatures by Ben Shenkman (You can see the Carson caricature briefly in Freleng’s Slick Hare as well.) Watchful eyes will notice the rampant animation reuse from Tashlin’s Swooner Crooner.

I included a bit of footage from the actual movie to put it in context. (The squaw harassing Carson is a running gag throughout it.) Clearly you can see why it’s not on DVD: it’s a bad old movie. So it’s chances of release are slim to none.

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Jerry Beck has posted on an issue very dear to me — the issue of film projection versus digital projection. (I know its main focus is the non-issue of whether 3-D is a faddish gimmick or not (FYI, it is), but this part was more interesting to me.)

Quite honestly, the only people who see this as a non-issue have never actually threaded a projector themselves. They don’t understand the beauty of being able to see and hold each frame of film; nor do they understand what an event it is to see a print projected.

Technology will march on. Give it a decade and, wow, you won’t believe the “film-like brilliance” of the latest digital projector. But if you’re into cinema history, and you’re a collector of classic films, who gives a shit? The films in question are not made to be shown on video. They are not digital. They are of the resolution they were created in (or close enough for us small-timers via 16mm).

Over and over I have the wonderful ability to blow people away by showing them the REAL THING, that’s right, the REAL THING, not a video replica (all video is is a replica). There is aesthetic (and cultural) value to presenting films in their original film format – period! (Which is why I’ve been weeding the Eastman stock out of my collection, because I can’t justify screening things that unquestionably have better color on DVD.) This “neato old stuff I still have” part is insignificant in the, well, big picture for many of us.

One more thing to think about: film may deteriorate in bad storage conditions, but in all but the absolute worst cases is the film not un-runnable, and I’ve been able to project horribly cared for films dating back to the 1910s. I’m lucky if a DVD I leave on my dorm room floor over night will actually work the next day.

A final thought: thousands of movies, thousands of hard drives, thousands of man-hours necessary to repeatedly back up/migrate/inventory these constantly-needed backups.

Unlike a 35mm neg. Which you put on the shelf and walk away from for 100 years.

I went ahead and ordered a copy of Leo McCarey’s Once Upon a Honeymoon from the new Warner Archive collection. The good news is that I like the movie as much as the last time I saw it on TCM. It’s pretty uneven with scenes that just feel padded or unnecessary (like Ginger Rogers’ embarrassingly long first conversation with Albert Dekker’s counterspy character), but it’s very effective in being one of the few films of the era that shows the real crimes committed by the Nazis in Europe while managing to retain moments of high comedy. It’s part of the same group (but certainly not in the same league) as The Great Dictator and To Be or Not To Be. (You sure as hell wouldn’t see this kind of stuff in a picture from Walt Disney!)

The bad news is: this mail order copy sucks. It’s a DVD-R, unrestored, interlaced, and with no special menus or chapter stops. In summation, I could have just recorded this off TCM (on VHS even) and I could have had just as good a copy. I’m hearing that the other older black-and-white movies fit the same bill. I have no idea if later movies from Warner Archive are preserved in anamorphic widescreen (better than a TCM recording) or just letterboxed (same as a TCM recording). My advice is to just wait until one of these non-widescreen titles shows up on TCM and get your copy from there.

Come to think of it, Warners is the last studio that I’d like to see do this, because they at least have a 24 hour classic movie channel. Universal (and pre-49 Paramount), Fox, and Republic on the other hand, I’d jump at even in the same lackluster presentation, given the reams of unavailable titles.

It’s nice to know some people have money to waste in this recession with things like this.